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March 10, 2009

The end of Esther

A lot of bloggers are posting "Purim Torah" today -- think
"April fool's posts," more or less. I don't have any Purim Torah to give
over, so instead I'm posting a serious piece that I meant to post a few days ago
but life got in the way.

There's a lot to love about the megillah of Esther. I've waxed
rhapsodic about it before in these pages (I direct your attention
especially to last year's Redemption
and the true king and to The
whole megillah, my 2006 review of JT Waldman's gorgeous
graphic novel rendition of the story.) But near the very end of the scroll,
there's some material I don't love quite as much.

Chapter nine of the megillah describes the revenge the Jews take
on those who had desired to slaughter them, and reading it makes me uncomfortable.

Let's be clear: in my understanding the Book of Esther is not a historical text. The story
it chronicles never "happened." (Biblicist Marc Zvi Brettler calls it
"more like comedy, burlesque, or farce.")

But even if we relate to the megillah of Esther as pure story,
as a rich and finely-crafted parable about masks and inversion and
the challenges of living in an era when God's face may seem as hidden
from us as God's name is absent from this traditional text, how
can, or should, we deal with the violence at the end of the story?

Much is made of how this scroll, alone
among the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, makes no mention whatsoever
of God; though many readers (especially Hasidic commentators) find God's
presence hidden subtly all over the text, maybe we should be grateful
that God's name never appears here, so we need not attribute this
instance of bloody vengeance to divine will or a divine hand.

Some of us don't want to read chapter nine aloud.
Others have taken to reading it in Eikha trope -- the sorrowing
minor melodic mode we use for chanting Lamentations on Tisha b'Av, instead
of the happier tune we use for chanting Esther on Purim. (I have the feeling
the two melodic systems are related, though don't know either well enough
to say for sure.) Some of my friends and colleagues have asked: should we still be reading
this at all? Doesn't it offend our deep post-triumphalistic and peace-seeking
desires?

But when we studied this text
at the end of the Biblical History class I took this past fall,
my teacher Reb Leila Gal Berner argued that
we can't excise these verses from our text -- nor should we.
We have to grapple with the end of the book, and even if we
breathe a sigh of relief when we say "this didn't really happen," we have
to ask ourselves why this violent end to the story is in our text,
and how we want to address the reality that it is there.

The ending of the story carries forward the theme of inversions and reversals that recurs
throughout the story: Achashverosh banished Vashti because she
was uppity and he wanted to be in charge -- but he wound up wrapped
around Esther's finger, not in charge at all. Haman wanted to hang
Mordechai from the gallows that Haman built -- but instead Haman
himself wound up swinging. The Jews were in grave danger once the king
signed a decree giving the citizens of the land the right to kill and
plunder -- but instead the tables were turned one last time, and the Jews
took vengeance on those who would have slaughtered us.

This reads to me like the revenge fantasy of an oppressed people,
fueled by deep collective memory of persecution and slaughter.
You wanted to kill us, but aha: when we tell the story, we get to be the
ones who are really in control! It's a safe way of blowing off steam:
instead of actually acting out, we tell a story wherein we get to be the
conquerors instead of the conquered for a change.

The shadow side of this practice, of course, arises when we lose
sight of the reality that this was supposed to be harmless storytelling.
(I'm thinking here of the senseless and tragic deaths of Muslims at prayer
during the Cave
of the Patriarchs massacre on Purim fifteen years ago. My teacher
Reb Arthur Waskow has written powerfully about that: From
A Dark and Bloody Purim, New Torah.)

For me, the value in preserving a text like the end of the Megillah
of Esther -- or the passage shfoch chamatecha ("Pour out Your
wrath") which appears in the traditional haggadah alongside the filling
of Elijah's cup, and which asks God to pour out divine wrath on those who do
not know God -- is that these texts speak the
painful, ugly reality that oppression breeds anger and fury to which we
must attend. (For a resource on reclaiming shfoch chamatecha,
I recommend Laura Levitt's Reflections
at ritualwell. I'll have more to blog about that as Pesach approaches.)

These texts can provoke the crucial conversations that we must have
about the lingering aftereffects of oppression. The aftereffects of
pogroms, of the Shoah, of the feelings of fear and defensiveness which
are present in the lives of so many Jews. It is out of systemic oppression,
and the memory of such oppression, that the desire for vengeance arises.
We see it buried in our texts, bursting forth in places like the end
of the megillah with a vehemence which can be unsettling and uncomfortable.
We see it in our communities, in the listserv discussions which arise
every time Israel engages in combat with one of its neighbors.

For those of us who identify deeply as seekers of peace, this is
troubling and painful. But we can't pretend that it isn't there. This
year, when we read the violent end of the Megillah of Esther, can we
use that experience to propel us into talking about the natural human
desire for power and for vengeance against those who (we believe)
would do us ill?

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The end of Esther

A lot of bloggers are posting "Purim Torah" today -- think
"April fool's posts," more or less. I don't have any Purim Torah to give
over, so instead I'm posting a serious piece that I meant to post a few days ago
but life got in the way.

There's a lot to love about the megillah of Esther. I've waxed
rhapsodic about it before in these pages (I direct your attention
especially to last year's Redemption
and the true king and to The
whole megillah, my 2006 review of JT Waldman's gorgeous
graphic novel rendition of the story.) But near the very end of the scroll,
there's some material I don't love quite as much.

Chapter nine of the megillah describes the revenge the Jews take
on those who had desired to slaughter them, and reading it makes me uncomfortable.

Let's be clear: in my understanding the Book of Esther is not a historical text. The story
it chronicles never "happened." (Biblicist Marc Zvi Brettler calls it
"more like comedy, burlesque, or farce.")

But even if we relate to the megillah of Esther as pure story,
as a rich and finely-crafted parable about masks and inversion and
the challenges of living in an era when God's face may seem as hidden
from us as God's name is absent from this traditional text, how
can, or should, we deal with the violence at the end of the story?